The 21/7 terror trial cover-up: Government explosives experts say they warned police forensic evidence was wrong but their report was buried

The Mail on Sunday has revealed evidence of an astonishing legal cover-up that threatens to wreck one of Britain’s biggest terrorism cases – the convictions of the five men jailed for a combined total of 153 years for the ‘21/7’ attempted London bombings in 2005.

In an exclusive interview, two top Government explosives experts who were directly involved in the case have revealed that in 2006, a year before the trial, they filed a highly critical report saying that the forensic tests that would become central to the prosecution case were fatally flawed.

Speaking for the first time publicly about the case, Sean Doyle, who was head of research at the Ministry of Defence’s Forensic Explosives Laboratory (FEL) at the time and went on to become its principal scientist, says he and his colleagues at the lab invoked a formal ‘miscarriage of justice procedure’, so that their concerns about forensic tests carried out by Dr Stuart Black of Reading University’s archaeology department – who, they say, is not an expert in explosives – would be shared with the defence and aired in court.